If one has a routine colonoscopy at the age of 50 and then colonoscopies thereafter as the physician recommends, you could largely prevent colon cancer, you could detect it in its very earliest stages and cure it.

When we think about lung cancer, the biggest environmental factor is without doubt smoking. Um, that would make a huge impact and has made a huge impact on the incidence of lung cancer. We have to keep pushing that and making it clear to everybody why smoking is so dangerous.

I think that the marriage of academic medical centers and academicians with the private sector is a very, is a marriage made in heaven because it's the best way to get basic discoveries from the laboratory into new therapeutics for our patients.

Precision medicine is one way to attack cancer and it's proven to be very effective but, remember that like HIV/AIDS, you're going to need combination therapies.

There are clearly environmental factors that can decrease the incidence and death from cancer. I would still say though that the majority of cancers cannot be prevented at this point, but they can be treated and they can be treated two major ways.

Hepatitis C was a devastating disease but because fundamental research was done in hepatitis C, it is now curable. It is now absolutely curable with new medications. So this is transformative.

Probably all of us have random rogue cancer cells floating around in our bodies but by and large, in the majority of cases, our immune system circulates and acts as a surveillance mechanism and kills off those few tumor cells.